So yesterday we talked about zombie movies and what makes them tick, and I learned something new about our readers: you people love the walking dead! I was expecting a few people to pipe up and argue that horror movies are disgusting and unnecessary; after all, isn't there enough pain and suffering in the world as it is? All ya gotta do is open up the newspaper, and there's your horror story! Which would've given me the opportunity to provide the counter-argument to that, which is: I think that's exactly why we need them.

Let me explain by providing a recent example from my local newspaper, the LA Times. For those of you who haven't heard (I'm not sure how far news like this travels), we've had a strange and bloody couple of weeks here in angel city:

Sunday, Feb 24: Two People Stabbed While Watching Horror Movie
This is probably my worst nightmare; I often think of how vulnerable we are in movie theaters, sitting essentially alone in the dark surrounded by strangers. (Heck, Lincoln died that way, and John Dillinger was shot and killed by police coming out of a Chicago theater where he was watching a gangster flick.) Here's the scoop:

Half an hour into "The Signal," a man seated in a back row stabbed a lone moviegoer in front of him, police said. As the victim fled, a witness told police, the man walked toward the screen and stabbed a second man. The victims apparently did not know each other or the suspect, "leading us to believe this is just a completely random assault," Basham said. At the time, there were only two moviegoers in the theater in addition to the stabber and victims, police said.

Here's the creepiest part: "After the suspect fled, Basham said, the movie resumed: It is a slasher film about a mysterious electronic signal [broadcast through TVs and radios] that compels people to kill."

Wednesday, Feb. 27: A man shoots repeatedly into a crowd
There are still plenty of gang-related shootings in South L.A., but this one most certainly stood out from the pack:

Five children and three adults were shot Wednesday afternoon by a gunman who opened fire at a busy South Los Angeles bus stop minutes after classes were dismissed at a nearby school. In a scene of chaos that authorities were still trying to piece together, witnesses described a gunman who seemingly appeared from nowhere and began spraying the crowd indiscriminately. As bystanders dived to the ground, some adults swept up children from the path of gunfire.

As if that weren't enough ...

The article about the bus stop shooting concludes with this:

"Wednesday's violence comes after a month of high-profile shootings that began Feb. 7 when SWAT Officer Randal Simmons was killed during a siege with a San Fernando Valley man who had killed his family members. Less than a week later in Oxnard, a 15-year-old boy was shot by a classmate. In Northeast Los Angeles on Feb. 21, Avenues gang members got into a shootout with police that left two dead and paralyzed a large swath of the city for much of the day. Two days later a Yorba Linda man killed his wife and three children before turning the gun on himself. Monday night, a Baldwin Park man allegedly killed his mother and two neighbors."

What I'm getting at is this.Apparently, I live in a city gone insane, where murderous patricidal rampages and indiscriminate killings are becoming the norm. We read about this stuff in the newspaper, and after a moment of oh, that's horrible, we turn to the comics page. It's not because we're insensitive; it's because we have no way to process or really grapple with the information we're presented with -- it just seems, in a word, evil, and beyond our comprehension, so we stop trying to comprehend it. It reminds me of the bafflement captured by Tommy Lee Jones' opening monologue in No Country for Old Men:

"The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job -- not to be glorious. But I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. You can say it's my job to fight it but I don't know what it is anymore. More than that, I don't want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard."

If sometimes life seems like a horror movie, it's one that's playing in the next house, in the next town -- you know it's going on somewhere, but statistically speaking, unless you're a gangbanger or a cop or something, you'll never be tangled up with it in any real way. So how do you deal with that creeping feeling that the world is turning evil? How do you prepare for what seems to be coming? Exorcise it? I think we tell ourselves made-up stories about evil. Ones in which we can identify with the protagonist, who's fending off hordes of zombies or staking the vampire or appeasing the ghost; our best horror movies are stories about evil that has no explanation.

When horror movies try and make sense of the motivations of the demons or serial killers who are menacing the regular folk, they get all mucked up, because we don't want to know; because the stories in the newspaper about the guy who murders his family or sprays a bus stop with his 9mm or stabs strangers in a darkened theater all seem, at their root, to be stories about evil, perpetrated by souls so twisted as to be unrecognizable. So the perpetrators in our horror movies are usually perversions of the human form: their flesh is rotted; they wear freaky masks; they are translucent and move about in an unnatural way. Because that child killer I read about can't be human -- not human the same way I am -- so our horror movie villains are not-quite-human, as well.